Research on Resource Utilization and Environmental Impact for Chinese Economy

In the course of booming economic growth based on mass production and consumption, China has been discharging an enormous amount of wastes giving rise to a wide range of environmental impacts. The method of economy-wide material flow analysis (EW-MFA) is one of the effective tools to examine and assess the metabolic performance of physical economies, but relevant researches in China most focus on throughput but rarely concern utilization of recycling resource and environmental impact. This paper analyzes the characteristics of resource utilization and environmental impact for the years 1990-2005 using the indicators derived from EW-MFA. The ration of recycled material (RRM) is added as the new indicator in order to be in accordance with the need of circular economy being promoted in China. Finally some deficiencies of EW-MFA are pointed out.